ETHAN AND JOEL COEN: Real answers — sort of — to questions about violence in their No Country for Old Men.

In the pioneering early-’80s days of the Toronto Film Festival, the audience actually rose to its toes before movie showings for a canned recording of “God Save the Queen,” with Elizabeth II, white-gloved, up above on the screen. There was a lingering colonialism in the Dominion of Canada, and also a blue-nosed uprightness. Who can forget the Ontario provincial censor board’s routinely yanking erotic-themed films off the festival schedule? If you wanted porno movies, cross the border to Buffalo.

Nobody at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival (September 6-15) gave a hoot about Queen Lizzie, not with Brad Pitt and, yes, Paris Hilton in town — and censorship in Ontario has long been defanged. Check the ocean of adult-pages ads in the local alternative papers: “Oral $40, Complete $70.” Toronto now is an open city, far beyond prissy Boston. Which is why, with dirty-old-man hope, I arrived for the first festival screening of Martin Gero’s YOUNG PEOPLE FUCKING, a boldly filthy first feature by an Ottawa-based director. But then the movie started. And instead of fornicating, a host of bland, soaps-level Canadian actors kept talking. Witless TVish talk. About Sexuality. Did they ever just shut up and screw? Who knows, because I bolted after a trying half-hour.

Where to get my festival jollies? I signed up for an interview with Hollywood actress Jennifer Connelly, she of the deepest, bluest eyes on our planet. But first I had to see her new picture, the Terry George–helmed RESERVATION ROAD, in which she’s the grieving mother of a young son killed in a hit-and-run accident. Here we go again: I made it through 25 minutes of this horribly directed melodrama, a botched version of novelist John Burnham Schwartz’s decent literary thriller. “I’m canceling my interview,” I called Focus Features on the phone. “Is there a reason?” an annoyed PR flak queried. “Not really,” I answered. This Focus Features rep wouldn’t have been happy with my explanation: chatting in a hotel room with Jennifer Connelly wasn’t enough payoff for sitting through the entire excruciating movie.

I wish I’d exited early from Michael Moore’s odious, self-love documentary, CAPTAIN MIKE ACROSS AMERICA, which shows the fake-populist portly boy on a 2004 campus tour trying to register students to vote for Kerry. Moore made sure his editor included countless shots of audiences cheering Michael and chortling at his jokes, plus the likes of Joan Baez attesting to his worthiness. Probably not since Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens, a lollipop to Hitler, have there been this many crowd scenes and testimonials in praise of one egomaniacal individual!

Another American work at Toronto was similarly liberal in its politics but offered modesty and restraint. In Thomas McCarthy’s THE VISITOR, a taciturn, WASPy college professor (Walter Jenkins) has his circumscribed tweed-jacketed life interrupted — and made suddenly meaningful — when he allows a Syrian drummer to stay in his apartment. One day, the musician is arrested as an illegal and threatened with deportation. The second work by the filmmaker of The Station Agent, The Visitor was the sleeper hit of Toronto 2007. Another favorite, but more as a guilty pleasure, was Stuart Gordon’s STUCK, which was shown as part of “Midnight Madness.” Mina Suvari plays an empathetic health-care worker turned vicious, selfish yuppie by the prospect of a job promotion. She leaves a homeless man (Stephen Rea) caught in her car window, seemingly dying in her garage, so that nobody will know she’s injured him in a hit-and-run. Slowly, slowly, he becomes unstuck, and then the gory fun begins!

Review: The Road John Hillcoat doesn't stray from Cormac McCarthy's Road For those who found the Coen Brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men too lighthearted, John Hillcoat's relentlessly faithful version of the author's post-apocalyptic Pulitzer-winning novel might hit the spot.

Quiet men At heart, the Coen Brothers’ movies are about death — arbitrary, relentless, insidiously clever, with a gallows sense of humor.

Haven Orlando Bloom executive-produced this crime thriller set in the Grand Caymans back in 2004; it got a look at the Toronto Film Festival that year and has been sitting on the shelf ever since — with good reason. Watch the trailer for Haven (QuickTime)

Autumn peeves With pundits already reading political significance into summer blockbusters like The Dark Knight (“Is Batman a stand-in for George Bush? Discuss.”), the meatier movies of fall arrive not a moment too soon.

Mother courage The 2008 Toronto International Film Festival last September proved hospitable to Agnès Varda.

Pedro, Borat, and a castrato As usual, dedicated film critics were too occupied seeing four or five movies a day to note the swarm of A-list celebrities at the 31st Toronto International Film Festival.

REVIEW: LIKE SOMEONE IN LOVE | March 12, 2013 A decent little movie, but hardly a major one, from Iran's master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, who, self-exiled, here shoots in Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast.

REVIEW: THE GATEKEEPERS | February 26, 2013 Great cinema journalism, The Gatekeepers was the National Society of Film Critics' winner for Best Documentary of 2012.

REVIEW: THE LITTLE FUGITIVE (1953) | February 27, 2013 It's the 60th anniversary of this pioneering American independent feature, which greatly influenced both cinema vérité documentarians and the French New Wave.

REVIEW: HOW TO RE-ESTABLISH A VODKA EMPIRE | February 20, 2013 Daniel Edelstyn launched this film project after reading the spirited diary of his late grandmother, Maroussia Zorokovich, whose wealthy Jewish family split from Ukraine as the Bolsheviks were taking control.

REVIEW: HAPPY PEOPLE: A YEAR IN THE TAIGA | February 12, 2013 What Robert Flaherty did with title cards in his silent Nanook of the North , Werner Herzog manages with declamatory voiceover in Happy People : romanticization of the austere, self-reliant lives of hunters and trappers in the icebound north.